What do you think?
Rate this book
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.
482 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Frederick Cooper
59 books29 followersFrederick Cooper is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history. Cooper received his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and is currently professor of history at New York University.
Cooper initially studied the labor movement in East Africa, but later moved on the a broader consideration of colonialism. One of his best known conceptual contributions is the concept of the gatekeeper state.
Cooper initially studied the labor movement in East Africa, but later moved on the a broader consideration of colonialism. One of his best known conceptual contributions is the concept of the gatekeeper state.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 14, 2025
Tensions of Empire, by now a somewhat out of date work by historical academic standards, is a difficult book to review. Part of this is because it is a collection, but it is also because of the sheer amount of foundation this work built. Both building upon and reacting against the cultural turn, Frederick Cooper, Ann Stoler, and co. authored this work as the flagship of new imperial history, combining the theoretical influence of postcolonial studies inaugurated by Edward Said and others with political economy to produce dynamic analyses of the imperial relationship which moved beyond the somewhat reductive (though intensely valuable) and one-way relationship of world-systems theory. In short, the metropole shaped and exploited the colonies, but the colonies shaped and subverted the metropole. The colonial relationship, although exploitative, was give-and-take. The imperialists took, of course, but they were forced by colonial subversion to give, etc.
The opening essay by Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” acts almost as a guidebook for what new imperial history is intended to be. Colonial projects exposed bourgeois contradictions in the claim to universality by denying that universality to the colonies, but being forced to ideologically reckon with it (3). Denying the total primacy of culture and discourse, they “argue for a more dynamic relationship between the two, and above for careful integration of the relationship of the colonial state to the metropolitan state and of the making of the nation to the making of empire” (4). The colonial project was marred by the “ambiguities of difference” upon which it was built, as “what Europeans encountered in the colonies was not open terrain for economic domination, but people capable of circumventing and undermining the principles and practices on which extraction or capitalist development was based” (5). Colonial categories, obviously fashioned to their specific contexts and needs, required cooperation from and collaboration with native knowledge-holders, who pursued their own agendas (11-12). World-systems theory, flawed in its “inability to analyse agency, a functionalist mode of reasoning…[and] assumption of passivity within colonial economies,” fails to take into account the alliances and coalitions upon which colonial projects built their existence (19-20). This culminated not only in state-comprador alliances, but also dialectical relationships between political movements in the colonies and metropolitan radicals (23).
Uday S. Mehta’s essay, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” manages to be one of the more complicated works in the collection, discussing the nature of Locke’s philosophical works and the exclusionary tendency of liberalism. How, with its commitment to universality, does liberalism result in “the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and ‘types’ of people” (59)? The answer, Mehta finds, is in “the exclusionary transformation of Locke’s universalistic anthropology is effected by the implicit divisions and exclusions of the social world that Locke imagines” (59). Eligibility to liberalism’s universality, for Locke, requires the faculty of reason, which Locke saw to be lacking in “lunatics,” “idiots,” and children (67-68). Locke's explanation of reason “involves understanding a world replete with social and hierarchical distinctions” unavailable to the vast majority of humanity (69). In later liberals, such as Mills and his heirs, this understanding of reason took on a civilizational character which justified imperialism, particularly in regards to India. The Millsian theory of “civilization infantilism” rendered India inscrutable, and resulted in a loss of universality for less developed peoples (70-80). I don’t disagree with Mehta’s analysis, but he puts a bit of the cart before the horse. Why were these tenets present in liberalism from the get-go? Not because they were inserted by Locke and Mills and then society moved forward, but because Locke and Mills were (unconsciously, of course) building their theories for the bourgeoisie of their eras. I doubt Mehta would disagree, but his work bogs so deep down in the philosophical text that these greater concerns of political economy are lost.
Anna Davin’s “Imperialism and Motherhood” examines the ideology of motherhood in the British imperial era from the Boer War to World War I, concluding that as imperial projects expanded, Malthusian theory fell to the wayside in favor of theories which found “population was power,” and children a “national asset” (88). Competition with other colonial powers, the Boer War, and declining birth rates resulted in “a surge of concern about the bearing of children—the next generation of soldiers and workers, the Imperial Race,” blame for which fell upon working- and middle-class women in the metropole (90). Instead of economic and environmental conditions, the ignorance and neglect of mothers were responsible for infant deaths, shifting blame onto individuals and the family as a social institution to legitimize state intervention into the familial-parental relationship (90-92). There was some anxiety over this course being “socialism,” but imperial examples in Germany and Japan provided non-radical models, though it was also supported as an imperial project by the faux-radical Fabian Society (92-97). Eugenics, of course, played a role, and here the Fabians again raised their ugly head in arguing for a social safety net to ensure the British were not replaced by the “Irish and Jews” (97-103). Despite the fact that nearly ¼ of British mothers were in absolute poverty, an ideology of maternalism which emphasized motherly education was seen as the solution (103-115). One of the few successful examples of this intervention, the St. Pancras School for Mothers, neglected these forms of rhetoric and instead relied upon working with mothers to have their reforms adopted (118-123).
Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” is downright awful. Bhabha introduces the concept of “mimicry,” the act of a colonized subject imitating the culture of the colonizer, but in a form “that is almost the same, but not quite,” resulting in both subservience and subversion (153). Not a bad concept. But Bhabha’s prose is totally unacceptable, written in what must be an intentionally obtuse and intuitive way meant to express that Bhabha thinks he is much smarter than you. I think, ironically, that this exposes Bhabha as a victim of a sort of academic mimicry. His work is profound, of course, but it is written in a way that is “not quite,” like he is imitating Hegel or other German idealists but unable to break through towards his point. Bhabha’s mimicry is comparable to the “double consciousness” of Du Bois and Fanon, but less negative in that Bhabha allows for subversion of the colonial structure through this mimicry whereas Du Bois and Fanon largely analyze the effect upon a subject’s psychology being torn between two “worlds.”
John L. Comaroff’s essay, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” examines the role of Protestant nonconformist missionaries in the colonial structure of South Africa, locating them as caught between “state colonialism” of the Empire and the “settler colonialism” of the Boers, the missionaries casting themselves as the “self-appointed conscience of the colonizer” (183-184). Comaroof sees the missionaries as “vanguard of empire,” unstable within the metropole itself because they “came from the interstices of a class structure undergoing reconstruction…” (166). Comaroff finds three ideological origins of the colonial mission in South Africa, namely a “new moral economy” in the individualist “ideology of personhood” and “inequality [as] a sacred instrument of moral sanction; the “aesthetic despoliation of the countryside,” which encouraged utopian visions of pre-industrial rurality; and the “secularization of the age” in the metropole, which cast empire and imperial commerce as the new “Kingdom of God” (167-276). Nonconformist churchmen were “caught between rich and poor…the conferred respectability and a measure of security in their [precarious] social position,” but this precarity encouraged participation in the colonial project (176-178). Acknowledging the humanity of indigenous communities in South Africa, nonconformist missionaries had serious conflict with the Boers, while often being complicit in the less explicitly violent colonialism of the English state (178-191). Comaroff ultimately finds that colonialism existed “in a plurality of forms and forces—its particular character being shaped as much by political, social, and ideological concerns amongst the colonizers as by encounter with the colonized,” an observation which in today’s scholarship seems rather obvious, but was rather profound in 1997 (192).
Ann Laura Stoler’s “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia” examines the politics of the criteria of “Europeaness” upon which “metis”/mixed children were judged in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Stoler contends that mixed children constituted a sort of “interior frontier” within the imperial communities of their respective societies (199). Metis children were subject to state intervention, “to be molded into very special colonial citizens” and act as an arm of metropole without ever coming to the privileges that a recognized metropolitan citizen would enjoy (208). State intervention was key. If metropolitan fathers stayed with their children in a native milieu, it was abandonment through “going native” (207). If metropolitan fathers removed their children to the metropole, it was a “social death” (206). Women, of course, could not marry native men, as that would degrade both the woman and the race as a whole (217-222). “Going native” was a fear only ascribable to men, and their mixed children a subversive constituency that colonial authorities both hoped to harness but feared.
Susan Thorne’s “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain” seeks the development of racialism among the British working-class in the competition between domestic and imperial missionaries of the evangelical churches. Domestic missionary discourse, both recognizing the squalid poverty of the British working-class as well as competing with their imperial missionary colleagues, utilized a stream of discourse which saw Britain’s “labor poor as comparable to the Empire’s ‘heathen races’” (238). Considering the role of the nonconformists, “the institutional and social connections between home and foreign missions encouraged audiences to think about subaltern groups in Britain and the colonies in relation to one another, thereby rendering evangelical religious practice a principle site at which conceptions of race from the colonies entered metropolitan social discourse” (241). Replacing abolitionism as the evangelical cause of choice, the fight against “heathenism became the ideological tool for the British public’s newfound repugnance against slavery. And its application to the working class helped to contain the radical potential of evangelical missions,” diverting British class struggle into “racialist parameters” through conflict with foreign missions (249/252-254).
Lora Wildenthal’s chapter, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” covers the development of citizenship law in the German Empire to deal with the existence of mixed-race marriages while simultaneously upholding German racial “purity.” Accordingly, “citizenship law—organized by gender hierarchy—worked in a political context of colonial empire that was gender hierarchy and race” (263). Reich law recognized no racial definitions, while colonial governors sought to insert racial barriers into it (266). The German Colonial Office intervened to protect mixed marriages, legally preserving men’s rights, “if...they were married, prosperous, and otherwise ‘respectable’” (270). Activists for women’s rights in Germany opposed the extension of rights to mixed-race marriages, creating a “new, women-centered ideology of racialized colonial reproduction” (278). This racialized reasoning centered on the idea that German men’s mistreatment of native wives would degrade treatment of women in the metropole, both recognizing the abusive and exploitative potential of colonial-native power imbalances as well as reproducing the ideology of “going native” seen in the French and Dutch contexts (278-282).
Nancy Hunt’s “European Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo” details the Belgian fear of labor shortages in the Congo from the population crisis and attributing it to African birth spacing customs rather than Leopold’s genocide. The solution, to the Belgians, was Belgian women-led intervention into the lives of African women by expanding the availability of milk and infant health programs, which also allowed for the monitoring of colonial men by enabling the presence of European women in the Congo (297). Gwendolyn Wright’s “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in the French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930” examines the political and cultural conclusions from the colonial projects of (fascist to-be) Le Corbusier and others, finding that “urban design…assumed a major role in efforts to make colonialism more popular among Europeans and more tolerable to colonized peoples…emphasizing [cultural] variety and simultaneity…” (322). Pairing native traditions with colonial modernity and an Orientalist worldview with urban design, these melting pots of architecture offered “superficial acknowledgment of cultural difference” while excluding colonized peoples from actual political power or genuine concessions (323-334).
Fanny Colonna’s “Educating Conformity in French Colonial Algeria” is one of the most interesting pieces in the collection because it is the oldest—a selection from Colonna’s 1975 Instituteurs Algeriens, 1883-1939 translated by Barbara Harshav. Colonna demonstrates that, in French colonial teaching schools, “specific criteria of ‘excellence’ worked both to maintain France as a cultural standard and to sustain distance between colonizer and colonized” (346). Showing parallels between Jules Ferry’s education reforms in mainland France and the nature of education in Algeria, excellence was defined as “conformity to moral demands…goodwill, docility, and consistency” (360). It did not matter if an Algerian would be a good teacher: if they were too French, they were excluded. Not French enough? Excluded. Only cultural intermediaries, caught between Algerian-ness and the West, were “excellent” (364-365). It was this median that would provide enough familiarity with France for continued association and control, but without demanding the rights pursuant to being “French.” A very similar case can be seen with the U.S. treatment of American Indians after the period of immediate genocide had halted.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Difference—Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” is not very good, Chakrabarty’s own slimy nature aside. His objective is to show how anticolonial nationalism ���is haunted by a fear of looking unoriginal,” and thus when nationalists in Bengal adopted Eurocentric modes of thinking about women and domesticity, they attempted to justify it in reference to traditional cultural literature and religious contexts. He is correct, of course, but uses an outmoded style of writing more fitting to the 18th century along the same lines of Bhabha, complete with references to Heidegger of all possible philosophers. There is some value in two observations towards the end: “The modern is a myth in that it naturalizes history” and “The compulsion to think and translate the world through the categories of the European imperial-modern is real and deeply rooted in institutional practices…” (400).
Chapter 12, Frederick Cooper’s “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” is perhaps the best essay in the whole collection. Preempting his exploration of the gatekeeper state in Africa Since 1940, Cooper studies the moments in which the African labor movement and African nationalism broke sharply with each other, largely at the moment of independence. In the post-WWII period, African labor conducted militant strike action, recognizing the reliance of France and the UK upon them as a counterweight to rising U.S. hegemony. This forced the colonial powers, who had hoped to relegate the “proletariat” to the metropole, to recognize the “universality of the worker” and conduct European-style collective bargaining with Africa-based unions. African unions in French colonies appropriated imperial rhetoric, which stressed metropole-colonial unity and strength, for their own gains, and joined hands with the communist CGT. As the nationalist project made way, particularly in Guinea under Sekou Toure, anti-imperialism and African nationalism began to take precedence over equality, while once independence came to fruition, union leadership was politically co-opted. Ideologies of equality and anti-imperialism were largely supplanted by the functionalist nature of the gatekeeper state, relying on patronage networks, etc. (407-426). Cooper is right, but in his criticism of Toure in particular, he neglects the nature of French imperialism and the larger impoverishment of Africa. How were radical African leaders like Toure to pursue objectives of equality without embracing Mao-style equalization, which I doubt Cooper would approve of?
Luise White’s Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa largely deals with the ground that would be covered in her 2000 monograph Speaking with Vampires. According to White, vampire stories “disclose the concerns and anxieties of people at a specific time and place,” particularly targeting cultural and technology, informal knowledge and representations of a new and emerging labor process under imperialism heretofore foreign to African peoples (436-449).
The opening essay by Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” acts almost as a guidebook for what new imperial history is intended to be. Colonial projects exposed bourgeois contradictions in the claim to universality by denying that universality to the colonies, but being forced to ideologically reckon with it (3). Denying the total primacy of culture and discourse, they “argue for a more dynamic relationship between the two, and above for careful integration of the relationship of the colonial state to the metropolitan state and of the making of the nation to the making of empire” (4). The colonial project was marred by the “ambiguities of difference” upon which it was built, as “what Europeans encountered in the colonies was not open terrain for economic domination, but people capable of circumventing and undermining the principles and practices on which extraction or capitalist development was based” (5). Colonial categories, obviously fashioned to their specific contexts and needs, required cooperation from and collaboration with native knowledge-holders, who pursued their own agendas (11-12). World-systems theory, flawed in its “inability to analyse agency, a functionalist mode of reasoning…[and] assumption of passivity within colonial economies,” fails to take into account the alliances and coalitions upon which colonial projects built their existence (19-20). This culminated not only in state-comprador alliances, but also dialectical relationships between political movements in the colonies and metropolitan radicals (23).
Uday S. Mehta’s essay, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” manages to be one of the more complicated works in the collection, discussing the nature of Locke’s philosophical works and the exclusionary tendency of liberalism. How, with its commitment to universality, does liberalism result in “the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and ‘types’ of people” (59)? The answer, Mehta finds, is in “the exclusionary transformation of Locke’s universalistic anthropology is effected by the implicit divisions and exclusions of the social world that Locke imagines” (59). Eligibility to liberalism’s universality, for Locke, requires the faculty of reason, which Locke saw to be lacking in “lunatics,” “idiots,” and children (67-68). Locke's explanation of reason “involves understanding a world replete with social and hierarchical distinctions” unavailable to the vast majority of humanity (69). In later liberals, such as Mills and his heirs, this understanding of reason took on a civilizational character which justified imperialism, particularly in regards to India. The Millsian theory of “civilization infantilism” rendered India inscrutable, and resulted in a loss of universality for less developed peoples (70-80). I don’t disagree with Mehta’s analysis, but he puts a bit of the cart before the horse. Why were these tenets present in liberalism from the get-go? Not because they were inserted by Locke and Mills and then society moved forward, but because Locke and Mills were (unconsciously, of course) building their theories for the bourgeoisie of their eras. I doubt Mehta would disagree, but his work bogs so deep down in the philosophical text that these greater concerns of political economy are lost.
Anna Davin’s “Imperialism and Motherhood” examines the ideology of motherhood in the British imperial era from the Boer War to World War I, concluding that as imperial projects expanded, Malthusian theory fell to the wayside in favor of theories which found “population was power,” and children a “national asset” (88). Competition with other colonial powers, the Boer War, and declining birth rates resulted in “a surge of concern about the bearing of children—the next generation of soldiers and workers, the Imperial Race,” blame for which fell upon working- and middle-class women in the metropole (90). Instead of economic and environmental conditions, the ignorance and neglect of mothers were responsible for infant deaths, shifting blame onto individuals and the family as a social institution to legitimize state intervention into the familial-parental relationship (90-92). There was some anxiety over this course being “socialism,” but imperial examples in Germany and Japan provided non-radical models, though it was also supported as an imperial project by the faux-radical Fabian Society (92-97). Eugenics, of course, played a role, and here the Fabians again raised their ugly head in arguing for a social safety net to ensure the British were not replaced by the “Irish and Jews” (97-103). Despite the fact that nearly ¼ of British mothers were in absolute poverty, an ideology of maternalism which emphasized motherly education was seen as the solution (103-115). One of the few successful examples of this intervention, the St. Pancras School for Mothers, neglected these forms of rhetoric and instead relied upon working with mothers to have their reforms adopted (118-123).
Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” is downright awful. Bhabha introduces the concept of “mimicry,” the act of a colonized subject imitating the culture of the colonizer, but in a form “that is almost the same, but not quite,” resulting in both subservience and subversion (153). Not a bad concept. But Bhabha’s prose is totally unacceptable, written in what must be an intentionally obtuse and intuitive way meant to express that Bhabha thinks he is much smarter than you. I think, ironically, that this exposes Bhabha as a victim of a sort of academic mimicry. His work is profound, of course, but it is written in a way that is “not quite,” like he is imitating Hegel or other German idealists but unable to break through towards his point. Bhabha’s mimicry is comparable to the “double consciousness” of Du Bois and Fanon, but less negative in that Bhabha allows for subversion of the colonial structure through this mimicry whereas Du Bois and Fanon largely analyze the effect upon a subject’s psychology being torn between two “worlds.”
John L. Comaroff’s essay, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” examines the role of Protestant nonconformist missionaries in the colonial structure of South Africa, locating them as caught between “state colonialism” of the Empire and the “settler colonialism” of the Boers, the missionaries casting themselves as the “self-appointed conscience of the colonizer” (183-184). Comaroof sees the missionaries as “vanguard of empire,” unstable within the metropole itself because they “came from the interstices of a class structure undergoing reconstruction…” (166). Comaroff finds three ideological origins of the colonial mission in South Africa, namely a “new moral economy” in the individualist “ideology of personhood” and “inequality [as] a sacred instrument of moral sanction; the “aesthetic despoliation of the countryside,” which encouraged utopian visions of pre-industrial rurality; and the “secularization of the age” in the metropole, which cast empire and imperial commerce as the new “Kingdom of God” (167-276). Nonconformist churchmen were “caught between rich and poor…the conferred respectability and a measure of security in their [precarious] social position,” but this precarity encouraged participation in the colonial project (176-178). Acknowledging the humanity of indigenous communities in South Africa, nonconformist missionaries had serious conflict with the Boers, while often being complicit in the less explicitly violent colonialism of the English state (178-191). Comaroff ultimately finds that colonialism existed “in a plurality of forms and forces—its particular character being shaped as much by political, social, and ideological concerns amongst the colonizers as by encounter with the colonized,” an observation which in today’s scholarship seems rather obvious, but was rather profound in 1997 (192).
Ann Laura Stoler’s “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia” examines the politics of the criteria of “Europeaness” upon which “metis”/mixed children were judged in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Stoler contends that mixed children constituted a sort of “interior frontier” within the imperial communities of their respective societies (199). Metis children were subject to state intervention, “to be molded into very special colonial citizens” and act as an arm of metropole without ever coming to the privileges that a recognized metropolitan citizen would enjoy (208). State intervention was key. If metropolitan fathers stayed with their children in a native milieu, it was abandonment through “going native” (207). If metropolitan fathers removed their children to the metropole, it was a “social death” (206). Women, of course, could not marry native men, as that would degrade both the woman and the race as a whole (217-222). “Going native” was a fear only ascribable to men, and their mixed children a subversive constituency that colonial authorities both hoped to harness but feared.
Susan Thorne’s “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain” seeks the development of racialism among the British working-class in the competition between domestic and imperial missionaries of the evangelical churches. Domestic missionary discourse, both recognizing the squalid poverty of the British working-class as well as competing with their imperial missionary colleagues, utilized a stream of discourse which saw Britain’s “labor poor as comparable to the Empire’s ‘heathen races’” (238). Considering the role of the nonconformists, “the institutional and social connections between home and foreign missions encouraged audiences to think about subaltern groups in Britain and the colonies in relation to one another, thereby rendering evangelical religious practice a principle site at which conceptions of race from the colonies entered metropolitan social discourse” (241). Replacing abolitionism as the evangelical cause of choice, the fight against “heathenism became the ideological tool for the British public’s newfound repugnance against slavery. And its application to the working class helped to contain the radical potential of evangelical missions,” diverting British class struggle into “racialist parameters” through conflict with foreign missions (249/252-254).
Lora Wildenthal’s chapter, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” covers the development of citizenship law in the German Empire to deal with the existence of mixed-race marriages while simultaneously upholding German racial “purity.” Accordingly, “citizenship law—organized by gender hierarchy—worked in a political context of colonial empire that was gender hierarchy and race” (263). Reich law recognized no racial definitions, while colonial governors sought to insert racial barriers into it (266). The German Colonial Office intervened to protect mixed marriages, legally preserving men’s rights, “if...they were married, prosperous, and otherwise ‘respectable’” (270). Activists for women’s rights in Germany opposed the extension of rights to mixed-race marriages, creating a “new, women-centered ideology of racialized colonial reproduction” (278). This racialized reasoning centered on the idea that German men’s mistreatment of native wives would degrade treatment of women in the metropole, both recognizing the abusive and exploitative potential of colonial-native power imbalances as well as reproducing the ideology of “going native” seen in the French and Dutch contexts (278-282).
Nancy Hunt’s “European Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo” details the Belgian fear of labor shortages in the Congo from the population crisis and attributing it to African birth spacing customs rather than Leopold’s genocide. The solution, to the Belgians, was Belgian women-led intervention into the lives of African women by expanding the availability of milk and infant health programs, which also allowed for the monitoring of colonial men by enabling the presence of European women in the Congo (297). Gwendolyn Wright’s “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in the French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930” examines the political and cultural conclusions from the colonial projects of (fascist to-be) Le Corbusier and others, finding that “urban design…assumed a major role in efforts to make colonialism more popular among Europeans and more tolerable to colonized peoples…emphasizing [cultural] variety and simultaneity…” (322). Pairing native traditions with colonial modernity and an Orientalist worldview with urban design, these melting pots of architecture offered “superficial acknowledgment of cultural difference” while excluding colonized peoples from actual political power or genuine concessions (323-334).
Fanny Colonna’s “Educating Conformity in French Colonial Algeria” is one of the most interesting pieces in the collection because it is the oldest—a selection from Colonna’s 1975 Instituteurs Algeriens, 1883-1939 translated by Barbara Harshav. Colonna demonstrates that, in French colonial teaching schools, “specific criteria of ‘excellence’ worked both to maintain France as a cultural standard and to sustain distance between colonizer and colonized” (346). Showing parallels between Jules Ferry’s education reforms in mainland France and the nature of education in Algeria, excellence was defined as “conformity to moral demands…goodwill, docility, and consistency” (360). It did not matter if an Algerian would be a good teacher: if they were too French, they were excluded. Not French enough? Excluded. Only cultural intermediaries, caught between Algerian-ness and the West, were “excellent” (364-365). It was this median that would provide enough familiarity with France for continued association and control, but without demanding the rights pursuant to being “French.” A very similar case can be seen with the U.S. treatment of American Indians after the period of immediate genocide had halted.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Difference—Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” is not very good, Chakrabarty’s own slimy nature aside. His objective is to show how anticolonial nationalism ���is haunted by a fear of looking unoriginal,” and thus when nationalists in Bengal adopted Eurocentric modes of thinking about women and domesticity, they attempted to justify it in reference to traditional cultural literature and religious contexts. He is correct, of course, but uses an outmoded style of writing more fitting to the 18th century along the same lines of Bhabha, complete with references to Heidegger of all possible philosophers. There is some value in two observations towards the end: “The modern is a myth in that it naturalizes history” and “The compulsion to think and translate the world through the categories of the European imperial-modern is real and deeply rooted in institutional practices…” (400).
Chapter 12, Frederick Cooper’s “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” is perhaps the best essay in the whole collection. Preempting his exploration of the gatekeeper state in Africa Since 1940, Cooper studies the moments in which the African labor movement and African nationalism broke sharply with each other, largely at the moment of independence. In the post-WWII period, African labor conducted militant strike action, recognizing the reliance of France and the UK upon them as a counterweight to rising U.S. hegemony. This forced the colonial powers, who had hoped to relegate the “proletariat” to the metropole, to recognize the “universality of the worker” and conduct European-style collective bargaining with Africa-based unions. African unions in French colonies appropriated imperial rhetoric, which stressed metropole-colonial unity and strength, for their own gains, and joined hands with the communist CGT. As the nationalist project made way, particularly in Guinea under Sekou Toure, anti-imperialism and African nationalism began to take precedence over equality, while once independence came to fruition, union leadership was politically co-opted. Ideologies of equality and anti-imperialism were largely supplanted by the functionalist nature of the gatekeeper state, relying on patronage networks, etc. (407-426). Cooper is right, but in his criticism of Toure in particular, he neglects the nature of French imperialism and the larger impoverishment of Africa. How were radical African leaders like Toure to pursue objectives of equality without embracing Mao-style equalization, which I doubt Cooper would approve of?
Luise White’s Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa largely deals with the ground that would be covered in her 2000 monograph Speaking with Vampires. According to White, vampire stories “disclose the concerns and anxieties of people at a specific time and place,” particularly targeting cultural and technology, informal knowledge and representations of a new and emerging labor process under imperialism heretofore foreign to African peoples (436-449).
September 22, 2007
a collection of essays dealing with european imperialism and the colonized. a different look at colonization. focusing mainly on the 18th, 19th and early 20th century.
June 6, 2014
An indispensable compendium to the study of imperialism.
February 7, 2026
The Bible equivalent for European historians basically
September 17, 2021
Surety of success
Since the data we offer is authentic and updated; therefore, the surety of success is fully. We offer you amount back assurance.
Verified and authentic
The data we provide our customers with is updated, to the point and concise. The content is relevant to the certification exam. It is very easy and simple to understand. Questions and Answers are updated regularly.
ExamsEmpire can help you get certified cheaper and faster:
Latest Updates – Test questions updates for 90 days
Fully Satisfaction – over 104,825 satisfied customers
Amount Back Assurance - your amount is fully secured by
ExamsEmpire Amount Back Assurance, if you fail your test.
If you have any questions or concerns about any of our products, I will be happy to help you out and answer any questions which you might have.
https://examsempire.com/
Thanks again and have a great day!
Since the data we offer is authentic and updated; therefore, the surety of success is fully. We offer you amount back assurance.
Verified and authentic
The data we provide our customers with is updated, to the point and concise. The content is relevant to the certification exam. It is very easy and simple to understand. Questions and Answers are updated regularly.
ExamsEmpire can help you get certified cheaper and faster:
Latest Updates – Test questions updates for 90 days
Fully Satisfaction – over 104,825 satisfied customers
Amount Back Assurance - your amount is fully secured by
ExamsEmpire Amount Back Assurance, if you fail your test.
If you have any questions or concerns about any of our products, I will be happy to help you out and answer any questions which you might have.
https://examsempire.com/
Thanks again and have a great day!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews